Presently, it is common for individuals or businesses to have residing within their offices a system for generating and printing various forms of correspondence, or other postal items, and a postage meter to apply the postage necessary to mail such items. This arrangement is very convenient, since correspondence may be generated, printed, addressed, postage applied, and mailed directly from the office.
Quite naturally, postage meters were developed to relieve the manual application of stamps on mail and to automate the above process. Nevertheless, a postage meter residing within an office is not as convenient and efficient as it may first seem to be. As the meter is typically not interfaced with the system generating postal items, a postage meter must either be supplied with a correct amount of postage or must be supplied with the postal item's weight so that the postage amount may be calculated. This is so, even though the system generating the postal item may have information sufficient to allow a determination of weight and/or necessary postage.
Lesser expensive postage meters typically do not have a balance or scale integrated therein, thus requiring the user to estimate the amount of postage necessary to mail the item. This results in inefficiency as often an excess of postage will be applied to avoid the item's return for insufficient postage. Alternatively, a scale and, typically a manual, calculation of the necessary postage may be utilized with a lesser expensive postage meter to aid in the application of a proper amount of postage. However, this solution still requires the user of the metering system to perform steps in addition to the metering of postage.
A more expensive meter may have, incorporated therein, a postage scale to allow the weighing, calculation and application of postage as a single metering step. Meters offering this solution typically suffer from not only the added expense associated with the more complicated unit, but also the inability to determine and apply postage to a yet to be completed postal item. For example if a postal item is known to include multiple pages, but some or none of these pages have actually been produced, the meter is unable to weigh and, therefore, unable to calculate a correct amount of postage. The user must wait for the postal item to be completely assembled in its final form for application of postage or forego the convenience of the meter calculating the postage amount.
A more recent solution to postage metering is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,510,992 entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY PRINTING POSTAGE ON MAIL, assigned to Post N Mail, L. C., Houston Tex., hereby incorporated by reference. There the disclosed metering system provides for the sale of postage credit on portable processor devices to be later utilized in a processor-based postage metering system. However, such a system, although considerably more convenient than the traditional metering systems discussed above, still requires the input by an operator or a coupled device, of a weight or desired amount of postage. Although typically more convenient that a traditional metering device, this more recent solution still suffers from the disadvantage of requiring input of either a postage amount or weight by various means.
A need in the art therefore exists for a system and method that determines the weight of a postal item from information available within a system or process which creates the postal item, or a significant portion thereof. Moreover, there is a need in the art for a system which provides for the determination of this weight utilizing an interface with a separate process associated with the generation of the postal item.
A further need in the art exists for a system and method which calculates a correct amount of postage automatically from this determination of postal item weight.
It is, therefore, advantageous for the determination of postal item weight to be accomplished by a system coupled to a postage metering device which can be coupled to other programs, such as word processing, spread sheet, accounting, database, or graphics programs.